Mike Kershaw and I did just that with the Slackware distribution. I would not recommend it if you want to actually do any revenue-producing work on top of building (and maintaining) your own distribution. Putting a distribution together, even when you already have another architecture to use as a model, is very time and machine cycle intensive. I personally have _no problem_ with SuSE's pricing of their support contracts. The value they add to produce the distribution in the first place, and keep it updated is well worth that money.
The _only_ objection I have is not being able to evaluate the distribution on my hardware in my environment, with my product mix, _before_ committing to a service contract. Perhaps a modification of their evaluation copy would suffice. If I could agree to: 1. not use the distribution in production unless I pay for support _after_ the evaluation, 2. pay for installation support of the evaluation on a (reasonable) per-incident basis I would be willing to do that. I know that Business Partners can do something like this already, so I see little reason why that couldn't be generalized to more people. Mark Post -----Original Message----- From: Coffin Michael C [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, January 22, 2002 12:34 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Current Linux/390 Distributions Aren't Cheap -snip- The alternative is (to my thinking) not use any vendors "package", take the kernel source and IBM's patches and manually build and maintain your own system. Michael Coffin, VM Systems Programmer Internal Revenue Service - Room 6030 1111 Constitution Avenue, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20224 Voice: (202) 927-4188 FAX: (202) 622-6726 [EMAIL PROTECTED] <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
